The Food of Awakening

Many times we sit to meditate, or practice yoga, or we simply want to drop in and be present, and the mind is just too busy. We may come up with all kinds of metaphysical reasons why this is so: is it old impressions in the mind burning through, or am I picking up on the collective shift? Is it my karma or my dogma or just the echo of my mama?

Well, what if that distracted mind and foggy view has a less esoteric explanation, like the burger you ate too late last night?

Rachael Richardson is a licensed Nutritionist and Registered Dietitian since 2002. I will be talking with her this Thursday on a live teleseminar.

Here are some topics she addressed, to prepare us for the call:

“We could look at the cleanliness and the origin of foods, and the energy which they carry and move into the body. Our bodies become everything that we observe, touch, interact with, think, and eat, of course. So there’s all that energy that comes into us. We can look at choosing foods that are consciously prepared, developed, grown, etc.

There’s also the aspect of how we think about our food as we choose it. When you choose food, even food that you know is not that great for you, you can picture it going through the intestines, and ask, “how does my intestinal track like this right now? ”We can start with choosing clean foods that are as free of chemicals as possible. Having your own garden, choosing animal foods from farms where you know they are well-treated and well-fed, ordering from local farms, and choosing organic or whole foods from the grocery store, are ways to avoid lots of manufacturing and processing. If you are choosing processed foods like cereal or bread, make sure that they don’t have a bunch of extra chemicals that the body doesn’t recognize. If you can, choose foods without nitrates, artificial colors, msg, or hydrogenated fats, which are chemically processed and actually interfere with the cell membrane, which is where everything passed in and out of the cell.

Really tune into what your body needs day by day instead of deciding on a specific diet to follow all your life. Just because something works for you for a couple months at a time (let’s say, veganism) it doesn’t mean that it is the best or only thing that will ever work for you. Our bodies are always changing, and part of our diet is a self-expression of how we’re changing what we need every day.

Take an active part in food preparation. We can impart different emotions into our food, which then can be amplified though the cooking process, and then back into our bodies. For example, if you want to manifest love and nurturing, and let’s say that your immune system is down or you feel undernourished by the world for whatever reason, you can nourish your own self by preparing your food with that intention.

Eating socially is a way to share positive energy with people that you love. Potlucks are a great way to do this.
Minerals are a key to life, and most people are deficient, so a multi-mineral would be a great thing to integrate.

Another thing that is really important is Omega 3 fatty acids. Those are integral in the cell membrane, which are the parts of the cells that intake the cells nutrients and toxins. It’s the communicator.
Probiotics can be so helpful, because of cell communication. Our intestines synthesize a large percentage of our neurotransmitters, which are of course our chemical communicators. Our neurotransmitters are produced in our gut and then shipped out to the brain to act as our our communication messengers. So, having good bacterial health in our intestines is huge. An overdose of bacteria or other microbes can impair energy, toxins, etc, that don’t belong in our body. They’ll starting to kill things that are in our blood and intestines, and can encourage parasites. It’s good to be aware if you have other microbes in your body. If you’re not sure, there’s a possibility that taking something benign, like a supplement called Alicin (which is basically garlic and other naturally ingredients) could protect your from microbes.”

Please join me in dialog with Rachael this Thursday, August 19th at 6pm PST. If you miss the live call, you can use the same link for the replay.

About Arjuna Ardagh

10 Responses to “The Food of Awakening”

I agree with most of what you shared. I see organic farms next to freeways and so always bless my food :). I communicate with animals and plants and nature for a living for almost 2 decades now. About 15 years ago I taught an advanced class in animal communication and one exercise involved people helping me prepare lunch in silence. They were to think of every thing involved in bringing the food to the table: someone planting seeds, sun, rain, wind, earth, insects, animals, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting and so on. They were to bless all the Beings who touched the food. They were to focus on loving thoughts and infuse it with love. They were to eat in silence and taste and savor and feel and embrace what they ate, because… all these things affected how their bodies absorbed the nutrition. I explained they could hastily eat a beautiful organic meal and not benefit nearly as much. Or eat while watching the TV, or being angry at some news program and the food is poorly digested. It IS really not difficult to lovingly prepare and eat food for your benefit. It just takes a little more time :)!

I will be listening to your call with pleasure, from here in Morocco, even though it will be 1am on the 20th!. I was wondering if either of you have done any research on alkaline ionized water, also known as hexagonal water. I’ve been looking into it in conjunction with my yeast free eating website and wondered what your opinion was. Also, in ho’oponopono they talk about blue solar water and I was curious if it has the same affect on the body as hexagonal water. Thank you for your great information. I look forward to the interview.

That’s a really interesting and important article – I really like “down-to-earth spirituality” and had to smile about “it might be picking up the collective shift” (even though I do feel that this has a rather significant influence most of the time these days ). “Echo of my mama”, cool!

I was just wondering – is anybody having deep and peaceful meditations after eating fish or meat? Personally, I was only able to tolerate eating meat myself when I was pretty “numb” … once perceptions opened up a bit, it became pretty distressing and even painful. It’s just not fun feeling the energetic remains of a fight for life inside your system and it certainly doesn’t feel right. Saying “thank you for feeding me” did help – but it felt more like doing one’s best to deal with a mistake one just made … personally, I decided to not make that mistake again.

Of course, every individual is different and has different needs and if you feel you really need to eat meat to stay healthy (and for some people, that simply is the case), it’s certainly better to get it from places where you know the animals are at least treated with respect while they’re alive than buying it from the store where it’s an industrially manufactured product (ouch!!!) … and I also feel that it’s better to eat less meat than more (I don’t see any benefit in fundamentalism – for a lot of people it seems to be an excuse to just “stay where they are” because “doing it right” is idealized to being impossible) … so I would consider any step towards less killing – however small it may be – a beneficial step.

But my feeling is that eating fish/meat still means killing individual complex sentient beings that like being killed as much as we do: Not at all.

Thank you Arjuna! Very much for sharing your insightful reminder food is energy and energy is what we need to thrive. So share food an enjoy life and do more than just survive thrive to make your life as well as your mind, body, soul to be healthy!

Wonderful post and I look forward to tonight’s call with Rachel. Also appreciated Morgine’s comment. I’ve been a vegetarian since 1976 and paid attention to food I put into my body for health reasons predominately, but not at the level I do now and as talked about above. I agree with everything that Rachel’s said here. I was not aware however that neurotransmitters were made in or synthesized in our gut. I hope she will talk about that tonight.

Food choices highly affect me. If I want to stay in tune, I have to stay more toward vegies and some complex carbos. But I don’t always follow what I know is best. I still love Chocolate and Pizza. Oh well

Then, after all we’ve learned about food and energy and manifestation…once one becomes awakened to the innermost intrinsic constituents of existence, we may then find life and eating as it was when we were as little children: everything joyous, delightful, sweet, and beneficent…that the “bottom line” truth is akin to “mind over matter—if you don’t mind, it don’t matter;” or the assertion by no less a character than one Jesus: “It is not what goes into one’s mouth that makes one pure or impure, but every word/thought that leaves the mind and/or mouth of God/Goddess.”
Or, ‘to the pure, all things are pure.’ Perhaps it’s like this. As one awakens to one’s innate and innermost Sunlight energy identity, one thenceforth relates and interacts with the Sunlight energy of all.

Thank you for this post it was fun to read. I love the topic of “the intention behind our food”, I think the intentions in growing and preparing food (living food especially) can literally transform to the food from regular food to super-food.

In addition to the intentions behind our foods if we can cultivate the mindfulness to observe the emotions that are connected with the food we consume we can drastically impact our experience of life.